Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
Mia
The silence wasn’t the same anymore. It didn’t feel like the first days—me calculating angles and him pretending not to watch me. It didn’t feel like the silence after that kiss either, sharp enough to cut. This one sat heavy and cold in the room, full of things neither of us wanted to touch.
We sat across from each other at the table. The fire behind him threw enough light to make half his face look carved from shadow, the other washed in orange. He stared at his hands like he was trying to decide whether to open them or close them permanently.
When he finally spoke, his voice was low. Controlled. “Your father was working with the Volkov syndicate.”
I didn’t understand at first. The words landed but didn’t arrange themselves into meaning. “No.”
He didn’t stop. “Eighteen months. He gave them Russo supply routes, safe house locations, financial data. Enough to take the entire organization apart.”
My fingers dug into the wood of the table. “My father wasn’t involved in any of that. He ran a business. He—”
“He laundered money,” Gabriel said. His eyes met mine, steady and bleak. “Fifteen years. His ‘imports’ were a front. That’s why he had access to everything.”
The room tilted for a second. I blinked until it held still again. “You’re trying to justify what you did. Lie to me so it hurts less.”
“No.” His voice stayed even. “Vincent had proof. Bank transfers, recorded calls, surveillance photos. Your father wasn’t guessing. He was selling them everything.”
Pieces slotted into place whether I wanted them to or not—late-night calls, sudden business trips, tension during holidays he thought I didn’t notice. I pressed my nails into the wood until they hurt.
“Why would he do that?”
Gabriel shook his head. “Money, maybe. Leverage. Protection. I don’t know. I wasn’t told his motives.”
“But you killed him anyway.” My voice rose without my permission. “Without knowing why. Without knowing anything except what you were told.”
“I had orders.”
The simplicity of it made something snap inside me. “Right. Because you don’t have to think. You don’t have to know if it’s right or wrong. You point. You kill. You go home.”
He flinched. It was small, but I saw it.
For a moment I wanted that to satisfy me—wanted him to feel pain, any pain, because it was all I had left to give back. But the expression on his face shifted, not to anger or defensiveness, but something closer to agony.
“I’m telling you because you should know,” he said quietly. “Not to excuse it. Just... so you don’t keep thinking it was chaos for no reason.”
I stared at him, breathing around the pressure in my chest. “Then don’t stop. All of it. Tell me.”
He hesitated before continuing. “The order came December twentieth. Your family. No witnesses. The Russos tried negotiation first. They told him to stop, return what he’d been paid, cut contact with the Volkovs.
He refused. Said if anything happened to him, the Volkovs would burn the organization to the ground. ”
“So they killed him anyway.”
“It’s what they do when someone endangers the family.”
“And what did it look like to you?” I asked. “Standing in our living room with a gun?”
He didn’t answer immediately. His hands tightened on nothing. “It looked like survival. Refusing means being next.”
I swallowed hard. “And my mother?”
“She knew. Tried to get him to stop. He wouldn’t.”
That hurt in a different way—quiet, deep, personal.
“And Tommy?” My voice barely worked.
“Your brother didn’t know anything.” His jaw locked. “He was collateral. Vincent doesn’t leave potential revenge alive.”
My lungs stopped working for a moment. Tommy’s face flickered through my head—laughing over pancakes during break, texting me stupid memes at midnight, telling me he didn’t need a life plan yet because he was twenty-three and had time.
“He should still be alive,” I said. Each word sharp and precise. “He didn’t deserve to die.”
“Neither did you,” Gabriel answered, not raising his voice. “That’s why I—”
“Don’t.” I cut him off before he could shape it into anything that sounded like mercy.
For a long moment nobody spoke. The fire cracked behind him. The storm slammed against the walls like it wanted in. My vision blurred and I blinked hard, refusing to let tears fall.
When I finally spoke, my voice came out steady. “My father made choices. Choices that endangered people. But you’re still the one who killed them. That’s never going to change.”
“I know.” His voice scraped out of his chest. “I know exactly what I am.”
I stood because I couldn’t sit anymore. The chair legs screeched across the wood. He didn’t move, didn’t reach for me, didn’t try to explain or defend. I crossed to the window and pressed my forehead against the ice-cold glass. The storm was just white—no horizon, no trees, no sky. Just nothing.
Behind me, he stood. His steps stopped several feet away, not close enough to touch, not far enough to forget him.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
I didn’t turn. Didn’t answer. Sorry meant nothing next to what he’d taken.
I stared into the storm and tried to hold too many truths in my head at once—my father as a traitor, my mother as someone who stayed anyway, Tommy as collateral, Gabriel as the man who killed them and the man who kept me alive and the man who kissed me.
Too much. All of it.
So I stayed at the window and let the world outside disappear, and let his apology sit unanswered in the space between us.
The hours blurred again. They seemed to stretch and collapse at the same time—too much and not enough.
I didn’t remember walking away from the window, only that eventually my legs stopped holding me and I ended up in the chair closest to the fire.
Too tired to keep anger burning at full strength. Too raw to hide behind silence.
Gabriel rebuilt the fire. He did it without speaking, every movement controlled but empty.
Not precise like before—this was the careful motion of someone running on instinct, doing a task because stopping would require thinking.
He sat afterward, not in his usual watch-post by the window, but across from me.
The flickering light hit him in a way that made him look like someone who’d lost something important and didn’t know how to get it back.
His shoulders weren’t squared like always. His spine wasn’t rigid. He looked... worn out. Almost defeated. His eyes stayed fixed on the flames, but he didn’t seem to be seeing them.
“This was supposed to be my last job.” The words barely broke the quiet.
I didn’t move. Didn’t breathe too loudly. “Last job” could have meant anything.
He kept staring into the fire. “Before the order came in. Before your father. I’d already decided—one more job, and I was done.”
The idea of Gabriel Russo—of this man—wanting to stop killing felt unreal. “Done with what?”
“All of it.” The slight motion of his hand indicated something wide—his life, the violence, the power structure that owned him. “I was going to leave. Run. Hope Vincent lost interest before he found me.”
“Why not leave sooner?” My voice came out low, unfamiliar.
“You don’t leave the Russo family,” he said. “Not standing.” There was no bitterness in his tone, just fact. “The only way out is to die or disappear so completely Vincent decides you’re not worth the trouble.”
The fire cracked. It echoed louder than it should have.
“You were going to run and start over,” I said.
“I was going to try.” His eyes still didn’t leave the flames. “Probably would’ve failed. Probably would’ve died fast. But it was the first time in my life I wanted something else.”
He paused long enough that the silence stung. When he spoke again, the resignation in his voice made it hard to breathe.
“And then I killed your brother.”
I went still.
“I’ve done a lot of terrible things,” he said.
“Enough that I stopped counting a long time ago. But killing kids isn’t easy.
Watching your brother sleep, not knowing he was about to die.
..” A muscle jumped in his jaw. “It hit me harder than it should have. So, I just pulled the trigger anyway. And watched something good get erased because someone paid me to erase it.”
My throat tightened. My pulse hammered in my ears. I should have been furious—blinding, consuming furious. Instead the grief was too big to make space for anything else.
“And after that,” he said quietly, “I knew something had to stop. Either I did, or I became something worse than even Vincent shaped me into.”
He didn’t look at me. He looked like he was bracing for impact.
“Why didn’t you stop?” The question slipped out before I could decide if I wanted to ask it.
His answer was immediate and ugly. “Because I was afraid.”
Not fear of death. Not fear of pain. Something worse. Something hollow.
“I’ve never been anything except what Vincent made,” he said. “And leaving meant admitting I didn’t know how to be a person outside of killing people for him.”
The fire filled the space while I tried to process the contradiction of the man across from me. The same hands that had tied me, fed me, shot my brother. The same mouth that had kissed me like it mattered and spoken my name like it hurt.
He leaned back slightly, the firelight showing every line of exhaustion etched into him. “But I’m leaving after this. I don’t know how. I don’t know where. I just know I’m not going back.”
I didn’t know what to do with the surge of emotion that hit me. It wasn’t forgiveness. It wasn’t hatred. It wasn’t sympathy. It was some impossible mix of all three, tangled into a feeling that made my chest tight.
I stood before I understood I was standing. Gabriel reacted like someone expecting an attack—tense, ready—then forced himself still. He didn’t move when I stepped closer. He just watched, eyes darker than the storm outside.
I stopped in front of him. Close enough to feel the heat from the fire and from him. Close enough to hear his breathing change.